Last week I shared the inspiring story of Jo and the team at Clockhouse and their journey to outstanding. In that story I mention the cultural eco-system.
What on earth is the ‘cultural eco-system’?
It has 3 elements:
Vision
Values
Strategy
And they are critical to creating a high-performing, outstanding, team.
But there’s a problem.
Every organisation already has these three elements.
The names might vary (vision/ethos) but you have them.
In most cases, the elements aren’t doing the job they need to do, because they are at the level of good, not great.
What does great look like? Well, you can take a look at Jo’s school to see.
Here’s a way to assess each element:
Vision
What does great look like?
Everyone on your team emotionally and logically wants the vision to become real.
Here are the three criteria to check this:
1. Team members feel and show emotion when they talk about your vision.
2. Everyone wants to make your vision a reality in word and deed.
3. Everyone remembers the core meaning of the vision and uses it to drive their actions.
Values
What does great look like?
People know and live the values.
Here are the three criteria to check this:
4. They are articulated and can be seen.
5. People can self regulate so everyone lives the values, without being told.
6. People know when this is the right school for them and when it’s time to move on.
Strategy
What does great look like?
Your strategy accelerates excellence with 100% clarity and 100% consistency.
Here are the three criteria to check this:
7. The school knows their top priorities and focuses on little else.
8. Everyone knows their top priorities and what success does and doesn’t look like.
9. Everyone does what needs to be done.
This is an easy way to see how many of the 9 criteria you have in place.
The most important word in those 9 boxes is ‘everyone’.
You might be thinking 100% isn’t realistic.
Maybe not everyday, because life is going to happen.
But it is possible most days, when we get the cultural eco-system right.
If you’d like help to achieve this, I’ll be sharing some great tools you can use at Breaking the Glass Ceiling of Good on 25th April and 25th June.
Spotlight Resource
Visions are often misunderstood.
We work on them at the wrong time.
And then they don’t get to shine and do the powerful job of creating full alignment that they can.
Most are boring! And so we don’t get to see many examples of powerful visions.
So here are some Compelling School Visions – 9 Examples Of Visions That Work.
You won’t like all of them, maybe none of them.
But they should stir some emotion, positive or negative.
Any emotion is better than no emotion.
And most importantly, they work for their schools.